Her rape kit had a DNA match. In San Francisco, that's not enough
Hacker News•July 23, 2026•10 min read•2 views
The 25-year-old couldn’t stop shaking as she signed a document authorizing nurses at San Francisco General Hospital to catalog her body as a crime scene. She’d moved thousands of miles away from her family to start a career in San Francisco as a mechanical engineer. After a summer spent training for a marathon, her legs should’ve been strong, but they trembled beneath her.
Over the next two months, she did everything a rape victim is supposed to do. Her case produced a DNA match to the man she identified, who was already in the FBI’s database. And then San Francisco did what it almost always does with rape cases: nothing.
m. on a Saturday in July 2025, according to an Uber receipt. In the emergency room, she was asked to relive the night’s events.
According to the San Francisco Police Department incident report, she’d gone to the Financial District apartment of Michael “Mickey” Gerold, whom she’d dated briefly the year before, a little after midnight. m. everyone had left but Gerold and his friend, whom she did not know.
What happened next, she’d later allege to police, felt calculated: The two men looked at each other, and Gerold stepped out of the room. She told police the man kissed her, groped her, subjected her to oral sex, and penetrated her with his fingers, according to the report. ” During the exam, evidence was collected from her head to her toes.
Blood was drawn from her arm for a toxicology test. Her mouth and body were swabbed for DNA — both hers and his. A lamp was shone over her skin to search for traces of semen or saliva.
Finally, a pelvic exam. The nurse found a cut inside her vagina and photographed it. The sexual assault forensic exam took four hours and 15 minutes, according to the SFPD’s report.
Fifty-eight days later, the crime lab results came back: DNA collected in the kit matched the man she said had assaulted her, whose genetic material was already in the FBI’s national database. It wasn’t a common result — the city’s crime lab matched DNA to a suspect in just 50 rape cases last year. It gave her hope that the investigation might pick up.
Instead, it stalled. To understand why San Francisco rarely builds investigations on sexual crimes to the point of making an arrest, The Standard interviewed more than a dozen sexual assault survivors, along with advocates and attorneys, and reviewed more than a decade of the SFPD’s staffing studies and disciplinary files, reports to the Police Commission, and local and national crime and public health data. We found that over the past decade, the share of rape cases the SFPD solved has fallen by more than half.
Last year, the SFPD made an arrest in, or otherwise closed, just 14% of its rape cases — half the national rate of 28%, according to data reported to the FBI. Over the last five years, San Francisco cleared rape cases at the lowest rate of any county in the state with more than half a million residents, according to data from the California Department of Justice. S.
cities. SF reports rape at one of the lowest per-capita rates of any big city, yet solves the smallest share of nearly all of them. Over the past four years, a rape was more than three times as likely to be solved if it was reported in Denver, Nashville, or Milwaukee.
And it’s not a caseload problem — each of these cities had more reported rapes than San Francisco. The SFPD is legally required to publish twice-yearly reports on the testing and investigative status of every rape kit but has failed to do so for 10 years. The Standard requested the reports in May.
They were posted on the department’s website in early June. The reports show that while rape kits are being tested faster, fewer alleged rapists are being actively investigated. Meanwhile, the number of investigators working sex crimes has nearly halved since 2019, leaving the unit the smallest it’s been in the department’s available records.
As the cases pile up, police heavily rely on an investigation tactic wherein survivors attempt to extract confessions from their alleged rapists in recorded phone calls. No confession usually means no arrest — even in cases like that of the 25-year-old engineer, where there is a DNA match. Gerold and his friend hired attorney James Hann to represent them.
In a statement, Hann said “The accusation is categorically false” and that “no one raped, sexually assaulted, made sexual contact with, or mistreated” the engineer that night. Hann provided sworn statements signed under oath from Gerold and two guests who were at his apartment before the alleged assault, but declined to provide their names or allow The Standard to interview them. , and that the other two guests could confirm it.
, and that nothing sexual happened while they were there. The engineer told police the alleged assault occurred after the guests left, when she was left alone with the two men. Gerold said that the engineer slept in his bed and brought him coffee in the morning.
A time-stamped receipt shows she left in an Uber at dawn for the ER, where she underwent an hours-long sexual assault exam. Gerold is listed as a witness on the resulting police report, while his friend is listed as a suspect. After The Standard reached out for comment, Gerold and his friend each sent a defamation lawsuit to the engineer.
Gerold also sent a defamation lawsuit to The Standard. The engineer asked to remain anonymous and asked The Standard not to name the man she alleges raped her, fearing further legal retaliation. Neither man has been questioned or arrested by police or charged with any crimes.
S. police fail victims of sexual assault. The perception was that the bottleneck between a rape and a rapist in custody was laboratory capacity.
Testing the kit would mean solving the crime and some measure of justice. It was a scandal that the country moved to fix. Over the last 20 years, the federal government has spent more than $1 billion on expanding lab capacity to reduce a backlog in DNA testing, and all 50 states passed some form of rape-kit reform.
San Francisco had its own backlog, and its own reckoning. In 2010, hundreds of rape kits sat in the city’s crime lab untested, some as old as five years. ” Then-Mayor Gavin Newsom signed off to fund the testing, but it took time.
In 2013, the crime lab director said the backlog was gone; the following year, after an audit found another 753 untested kits, SFPD Chief Greg Suhr ordered mandatory testing of every rape kit going forward. Only in 2016, after a survivor’s federal lawsuit and another round of hearings, did the lab finally staff up. San Francisco’s testing apparatus soon became a model for the state .
But alone, it wasn’t enough to solve the problem. In 2018, then-Supervisor Hillary Ronen called a hearing on the city’s handling of sex crimes. The SFPD commander did not know the rape clearance rate.
He was unaware that the number of sexual assaults had risen 21% that year and conceded that rape suspects are not always interviewed. The district attorney’s office couldn’t say how many rape cases were charged or led to convictions the year prior. ” The city created a survivor advocacy office, SHARP.
By a follow-up hearing in 2024, SHARP’s two staff members had yet to meet with leaders of the SFPD’s Special Victims Unit. In 2025, the San Francisco Women Against Rape crisis line received a total of 2,420 calls from around 1,100 people — a 15% increase from 2024. The number of adults who sought medical care after sexual abuse has roughly doubled over the past decade, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
Today, more kits are tested, in a matter of a few weeks on average. Yet fewer rape cases are investigated. In its rape-kit reports, the SFPD sorts cases into three categories.
“Open” means investigators are actively working the case. “Cleared” means it’s closed, often because there’s been an arrest, but also for other reasons, such as a transfer to another jurisdiction, the statute of limitations running out, or the suspect dying. “Inactive” is the department’s term for open but back-burnered cases that are sitting on a shelf.
Six years ago, more than half of rape-kit cases were open or had been cleared. Last year, barely 1 in 5 was. The other 78% of the 334 rape-kit cases sat inactive.
The Standard asked the SFPD why so few rape-kit cases are investigated. Spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky lauded the city’s quick processing time and lack of a rape-kit backlog and said cases may become inactive when a kit yields no additional evidence. He did not address the decline in active investigations.
In its rape-kit reports, the SFPD lists the possible reasons a case may go inactive. ” Experts say that’s a dangerous reason to stop investigating an alleged rape. “It’s a giant public-safety problem,” said Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy at the Joyful Heart Foundation, the nonprofit that led the national movement to clear the rape-kit backlog.
“Most rapists are serial offenders. They commit rapes over and over again,” she said. ” Four days after her rape exam, the 25-year-old engineer went to the Special Victims Unit headquarters to give her statement to police.
There, she was turned away. An employee told her that while the SVU investigates sex crimes, she’d need to file the report with a regular officer. She walked to the SFPD’s Southern Station, about a mile away.
After an hour and a half waiting in the lobby, she was brought into an interview room, where she sat across from an officer. She said she was “terrified” to come forward at all, fearing retaliation from Gerold and the man she alleged raped her, according to the police report. In the days since, she’d barely eaten or slept and was having panic attacks.
Still, she’d come prepared with a 20-page document of evidence she thought might be helpful: witnesses to contact, her Uber receipt, a timeline of the night’s events. According to the report, she told the officer she believed Gerold had “planned” the assault. Before she fled the apartment, she told police, she saw a discreetly placed security camera in the living room that likely captured the alleged assault.
, which she included in the packet. It was entered into evidence. It took another 12 days for her case to be assigned to a detective.
She answered a phone call from a blocked number and learned that the detective was SVU Sergeant Johnathan Ng. She said he asked her to retell the night’s events, then offered the one investigative step on the table: a “pretext call,” in which the victim tries to draw an admission from the attacker. She agreed to try.
She sat in a room at the SVU headquarters with Ng and a recorder. She dialed the man she alleged raped her. He didn’t pick up.
She tried again. No answer. “If we don’t get an admission, it’s a he-said, she-said thing,” she remembered Ng telling her.
Then, she said, he offered some unsolicited advice. “He told me that I probably shouldn’t be hanging out with 55-year-old men,” she said. The SFPD never contacted or interviewed Gerold, the man the engineer identified, or any people who were present in the hours leading up to the alleged assault.
m. m. at Gerold’s apartment from that night in which the engineer can be heard engaging in friendly conversation.
” The engineer told The Standard that she never consented to being recorded. Hann declined to provide The Standard with the unedited audio file. ” and include the engineer speaking.
The SFPD declined to comment on Ng’s conduct or on any specifics of the case. “Due to the open investigations, we are precluded from releasing further details regarding these incidents,” said spokesperson Robert Rueca. The pretext call has become the primary, often sole, tool investigators rely on in rape cases — frequently the only act between a report and the shelf.
” But nearly every sexual assault victim The Standard interviewed said they were asked to make a pretext call, and the SFPD’s heav
Hacker NewsJuly 23, 202610 min read2 views